The murder of Socrates by the government of Athens is a defining moment in Greek history. The whole situation was really a fraud and an act of madness from day one, but it is highly relevant because it shows the extent to which democracy can descend into disaster and madness. You need to place the trial of Socrates in the historical context of things getting very out of control in Athens. The heart of the matter was the megalomaniac plan of Pericles to conquer all of Greece. He was sort of an ancient world George Bush, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, take your pick up horrors to create an imperial world of so-called democracy. Pericles started the most destructive war in Greek history, the Peloponnesian war, to try to and conquer Sparta and knockout Sparta as a major power. Things really went wrong from day one when Sparta advanced towards Athens. The Athenians under Pericles' orders withdrew into the city. However that led to a plague which killed Pericles himself. What followed were a series of incredible blunders and disasters by the government of Athens which led to the shattering defeat by Sparta.
Now in the ensuing chaos after the defeat there was what's known as the rule of The Thirty Tyrants, a very strange affair where thirty supposed tyrants took charge, typical of what happens when you have a lot of disorder the loss of a war, so on and so forth. And they murdered a lot of people and generally did some not very nice things and then they themselves were overthrown. Now this was all very traumatic situation for the Athenian people and various forces decided to purify Athens for traditional values - sound familiar? So they put Socrates on trial. Now the trial of Socrates was a fraud from day one. the notion that he collaborated with the thirty is absolute rubbish. in fact he had opposed the thirty and had put his own life on the line to do so. But that really didn't bother the kind of lynch-mob that was set up to execute him. So without getting into all the details of the trial, they went ahead and voted for his execution.
Socrates to his credit, in probably one of the most important speeches, if not the most speech he ever made doesn't budge an inch and he stands his ground completely and make some very important moral points; which is that speaking out, speaking the truth, his concept of God that you serve God by speaking the truth, this is much more important than being prosperous and going along with the democracy and so-and-so on so forth. He puts forth a vision of life death and judgment that's really very compelling with his statement that no evil can harm a good man here or ever. He also discusses the concept of an afterlife from a somewhat skeptical point of view, but from a philosophical point of view. But the main point here is that Socrates didn't budge an inch. He openly accepted death rather than dishonor. It's a tremendously honorable moment in Greek history. He would not give in to the democratic government of Athens and he chose death rather than going along with all their bullshit. So what Socrates prophesied was to a large extent true, that the people who executed him ended up disgracing themselves in the eyes of history and he ended up becoming more powerful as a result of the manner in which he died.
The problem today is that people have not drawn the logical conclusion from this trial, which is the failure of Athenian democracy. Some attempt to portray it as some sort aberration. It wasn't an aberration. Athenian democracy self-destructed. It did. As Thucydides the great philosopher, the great historian of the Peloponnesian war, pointed out, it was the political failure of the Athenian system of democracy that was the main lesson of the defeat. Since then of course democracies have committed all sorts of other atrocities. The endless atrocities of the Roman Empire. America's genocide against the native Americans so on and so forth. We document these things on our page of war crimes and democracies, but the trial of Socrates is a morally defining moment of the total and complete self-destruction and failure of democracy in Athens. It is also the coverage of one man and his vision of reality. The vision that money is not power. It's not having the successful life and all the rubbish of American consumers and so on. It's taking a stand of death before dishonor that was Socrates' position and he earned himself an important place in history as a result of his decision.